1366609 - [geckoview] HTML chrome

Status: NEW

(GeckoView :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Provide a way to load HTML-based browser chrome in a GeckoView with chrome privileges and package that chrome inside an Android app.

This would be like a mobile equivalent of the functionality qbrt provides on desktop https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt It allows you to create a top-level window with a chrome:// URL to be used as browser chrome, which can then embed web content using the Browser API.

The use case of this feature is to allow the use in a GeckoView of Gecko features which are only available to chrome privileged code (e.g. for building a browser app with HTML-based chrome).

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

This could be part of GeckoView proper, but I would probably implement it as a discrete project that focuses on the tooling needed to package GeckoView with a webapp into an APK that uses GeckoView to run the webapp as a native Android app.

snorp and I have chatted about adding a feature like this to qbrt, so that you can publish the same webapp to both desktop and mobile platforms using qbrt.  I would be fine with that, and I think it's well within the scope of qbrt.  I also think it would be fine to implement this as an Android-specific tool.

(I'm not necessarily opposed to adding it to core GeckoView either, it just wouldn't be my inclination, given that GeckoView is designed to serve a variety of use cases and integrate with standard Android application development toolchains, whereas this is only one of the those target use cases and varies from those standard toolchains.)

Comment 2

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Yes, that hadn't even occurred to me because I assumed the scope of qbrt was desktop-only. I don't have a preference for where this code would live, I just really like qbrt and would like to be able to do something similar on mobile (Android).

Comment 3

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Enhancements should have severity N/A.